


The Soldier who Sailed the Lemurian Star

by MotherInLore



Series: So, I Guess my Muse wants Marvel, now... [11]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Instrumentality of Mankind - Cordwainer Smith
Genre: Angst and Romance, Character Death doesn't come 'til the end and it's mostly happy I promise, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, IN SPACE!, M/M, Medical Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-17 09:24:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16971972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: From the early days of the diaspora, when humans went out among the stars on fragile ships with vast sails of light, comes the story of James Hydra and Captain Frail-no-more.





	The Soldier who Sailed the Lemurian Star

The story ran – how did the story run? Everyone knew the references to James Hydra and Captain Frail-no-more, but no one knew exactly how it happened. Their names were welded into the glittering timeless jewelry of romance. Sometimes they were compared to Heloise and Abelard, whose story had been found among the books in a long-buried library. Other ages were to compare their life with the weird, ugly-lovely story of the Smash Doctor Banner and the Lady Elizabeth Ross.

Out of it all, two things stood forth: their love and the image of great sails, tissue-metal wings with which the bodies of humans finally fluttered out among the stars. Mention Steve, and others knew James. Mention James, and they knew Steve. One was the first of the inbound sailors, and the other was the soldier who sailed the _Lemurian Star._

It was lucky that people lost their pictures. The romantic hero was a very young-looking man, prematurely old and still quite sick when the romance came. And James Hydra, he was a freak, but a nice one: a grim, solemn, sad brunet who had been born among the laughter of the New Order. He was not the tall, confident hero of the actors who later played him.

He was, however, a wonderful sailor. That much was true. And with his body and mind he loved Captain Frail-no-more, showing a devotion which the ages can neither surpass nor forget. History may scrape off the patina of their names and appearances, but even history can do no more than brighten the love of James and Captain Frail-no-more.

Both of them, one must remember, were sailors.

 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

James Hydra was to take his place in the history of mankind, but he started badly. The name itself was a misfortune.

No one ever quite knew who his progenitors were. The officials agreed to keep the matter quiet.

His mentor was not in doubt. His mentor was the celebrated researcher Doctor Zola, a man who had campaigned tirelessly for the ascendance of science over emotion. He had been ambitious beyond all limits, and when the one and only Dr. Zola announced that he was going to raise a baby, that was first class news.

Dr. Zola went further. He announced his firm conviction that the mother should not be identified. The raw material of genetics was nothing compared to the finished project, improved every step of the way by the most advanced scientific expertise. Suffice it to say that Dr. Zola had chosen the ideal mother and would inevitably produce only the perfect child. Dr. Zola stated that he would avoid the nonsense of family names, and that therefore, the child would be named James Hydra.

Therefore it happened that the newscreens flashed pictures of a pretty three-kilogram baby: **THE PERFECT SON. WHO’S THE MOTHER?**

That was just the beginning. Dr. Zola was belligerent. He insisted, even after the baby had been photographed for the thousandth time, that this was the finest child every produced. He pointed to the boy’s perfections. He displayed all the foolish fondness of a doting father, but felt that he, the great Scientist, had discovered this fondness for the first time, and he insisted that he would tirelessly improve the boy further.

To say that this background was difficult for the child would be an understatement.

James Hydra was a wonderful example of raw human stubbornness triumphing over its tormentors. By the time he was four years old, he spoke six languages and was beginning to decipher some of the old Martian texts, but Zola could not break him of the habit of keeping pet snails. At the age of five he was sent to school. While his language and mathematical skills were excellent, he participated in group criticism sessions with extreme and obvious reluctance. His fellow schoolchildren immediately developed a rhyme:

_Jamie, Jamie,_  
_soft and dumb,_  
_Can’t learn to march_  
_To Hydra’s drum!_

James took all this and perhaps it was an accident of genetics that he grew to be a compact little person – a deadly serious brunet. He took up marksmanship as his Required Sport registration, since it allowed him to spend his time on the firing range, where the sounds of explosions drowned out the mockery of his peers, and he need not pitch himself against the tight gangs of friends with their ready fists. Challenged by lessons, haunted by publicity, he became careful and reserved about friendships and desperately lonely in an inner world.

When James Hydra was sixteen his mentor came to a bad end. Dr. Zola attempted to abscond with the tesseract, which item he declared was his by right, since it was his research that would enable Hydra to employ the artifact for the ultimate victory over mankind’s baser nature. His researches caused severe damage to the high-orbit yacht he had chosen as his new base of operations. The result was a sudden and catastrophic loss of the yacht’s outer shell and the introduction of all its contents into hard vacuum. Dr. Zola’s body was identified, and the tesseract not recovered.

At sixteen James was already famous, and at seventeen already forgotten, and very much alone.

 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This was the age of sailors. The thousands of photo-reconnaissance and measuring missiles had begun to come back with their harvest from the stars. Planet after planet swam into the ken of mankind. The new worlds became known as the interstellar search missiles brought back photographs, samples of atmosphere, measurements of gravity, cloud coverage, chemical makeup, and the like. Of the very numerous missiles which returned from their two-or-three hundred year voyages, three brought back reports of New Earth, an earth so much like Terra itself that it could be settled.

The first sailors had gone out over a hundred years before. They had started with small sails not over two thousand miles square. Gradually the sails increased. The technique of adiabatic packing and the carrying of passengers in individual pods reduced the damage done to the human cargo. It was great news when a sailor returned to Earth, a man born and reared under the light of another star. He was a man who had spent a month of agony and pain, bringing a few sleep-frozen settlers, guiding the immense light-pushed sailing craft which had managed the trip through the great interstellar deeps in an objective time period of seventy years.

Mankind got to know the look of a sailor from Captain Frail-no-more. There was a plantigrade walk to the way he put his body on the ground. There was a sharp, stiff, mechanical swing to his neck. The man was neither young nor old. He had been awake and conscious for seventy years, thanks to the drug which made possible a kind of limited awareness. By the time the psychologists interrogated him, first for the proper authorities of Hydra and later for the news releases, it was plain enough that he thought the seventy years were about a month. He never volunteered to sail back, because he had aged seventy years. He was a young man, young in his hopes and wishes, but a man who had burnt up a quarter of a human lifetime in a single, agonizing experience.

At this time, James Hydra went to Culver. General Ross’s College was the finest research college in the Atlantic world. Culver had reconstructed its protohistoric traditions and the neo-Virginians had recaptured that fine edge of engineering which reconnected their traditions with the earliest antiquity.

Naturally enough the language was cosmopolite Earth and not archaic English, but the students were proud to live at a reconstructed university very much like the archaeological evidence showed it to have been before the period of darkness and troubles came upon the earth. James shone a little in this renaissance.

The news-release services watched James in the cruelest possible fashion. They revived his name and the story of his mentor. Then they forgot him again. He had put in for six professions, and his first choice was “sailor.” His picture was beside the captain’s on the screens before they ever met each other.

Actually, he was not anything like the news profiles at all. He had suffered so much in his childhood from _Jamie, Jamie, soft and dumb,_ that he was competitive only on a coldly professional basis. He hated and loved and missed the tremendous mentor whom he had lost, and resolved so fiercely not to be like his mentor that he became an embodied antithesis of Zola.

Zola had been round, fussy, distractible – the kind of man who admires the military because he is not very soldierly. James never thought about his own masculinity. He just worried about himself. His face would have been round if it had been plump, but he was not plump. Brown-haired, sad-eyed, broad-shouldered but thin, he was a genetic demonstration of his unknown parents. His teachers often feared him. He was a pale, quiet boy, and he always knew his subject.

His fellow students had joked about him for a few weeks and then some of them banded together against the indecency of the press: “Don’t let James look at the frames. He’s be best person we have in the non-collateral sciences and we can’t have him upset just before the tripos...” 

They protected him, and it was only by chance that he saw his own face in a news-frame. There was the face of another man beside his. He looked like a bewildered dog, he thought. Then he read, **“PERFECT SON WANTS TO BE A SAILOR. SHOULD SAILOR HIMSELF MEET THE PERFECT SON?”** His cheeks burned with helpless, unavoidable embarrassment and rage, but he had grown too expert at being himself to do what he might have done in his teens – hate the man. He knew it wasn’t the Captain’s fault either. It wasn’t even the fault of the silly pushing men and women from the news services. It was time, it was custom, it was humanity. But he had only to be himself and serve Hydra, if he could ever find out what that really meant.

Their dates, when they came, had the properties of nightmares.

A news service sent a woman to tell James he had been awarded a week’s holiday in New Madrid.

With the sailor from the stars.

James refused. Then the captain refused, too, and he was a little to prompt for James’ liking. James became curious.

Two weeks passed, and in the office of the propaganda division brought two slips to the director. They were the vouchers for James Hydra and Captain Frail-no-more to obtain the utmost in preferential luxury in New Madrid. The treasurer said, “These have been issued and registered as gifts with the Party, sir. Should they be canceled?” The director had had his fill of stories that day, and he felt humane. On an impulse, he commanded the treasurer, “Tell you what. Give those tickets to the young people. No publicity. We’ll keep out of it. If they don’t want us, they don’t have to have us. Push it along. That’s all. Go.”

The tickets went back out to James. He had made the highest record ever reported back at the university, and he needed a rest. When the propaganda agent have him the ticket, he said, “Is this a trick?” Assured it was not, he then asked, “Is that man coming?” He couldn’t say “the sailor” - it sounded too much like the way people had always talked about himself – and he honestly didn’t remember his other name at the moment.

The agent did not know.

“Do I have to see him?” said James.

“Of course not,” said the agent. The gift was unconditional.

James laughed, grimly. “All right, I’ll take it and say thanks. But one picturemaker, mind you, just one, and I walk out. Or I may walk out for no reason at all. Is that all right?”

Since this had been an initiative from one of the news services, and not a direct order from the party, it was.

Four days later James was in the pleasure city of New Madrid, and a master of the dances was presenting him to an odd, intense blond man whose muscles bulged startlingly. “Junior scientist James Hydra – Sailor of the stars Captain Frail-no-more.” 

“Steve,” the Captain corrected, gently.

The Master of the Dances looked at both young men shrewdly and smiled a kind, experienced smile. He added the empty phrase of his profession, “I have had the honor and I withdraw.”

They were alone together on the edge of the dining room. The sailor looked at James very sharply indeed and then said, “Who are you? Are you somebody I have already met? Should I remember you? There are too many people here on Earth. What do we do next? What are we supposed to do? Would you like to sit down?”

James said one “yes,” to all those questions and never dreamed that the single yes would be articulated by hundreds of great actors, each one in the actor’s own special way, across the centuries to come.

They did sit down.

How the rest of it happened, neither of them was ever quite sure. 

James had to quiet Steve almost as though he were a hurt person in the House of Recovery. He explained the dishes to him and when he still would not choose, James gave the robot selections for him. James warned him, kindly enough, about manners when he forgot the simple ceremonies of eating which everyone knew, such as standing to salute the General’s portrait before beginning, or putting the scraps into the solvent tray and the silverware into the transfer.

At last Steve relaxed and did not look so old.

Momentarily forgetting the thousand times he had been asked silly questions himself, James asked him, “Why did you become a sailor?”

Steve stared at him in open-eyed inquiry as though James had spoken in an unknown language and expected a reply. Finally, he mumbled, “Are you – you, too – saying that – that I shouldn’t have done it?”

James shook his head hard in an instinctive apology. “No, no, no. You see, I have myself put in to be a sailor.”

Steve merely looked at him, his young-old eyes open with observativeness. He did not stare, but merely seemed to be trying to understand words, each one of which he could comprehend individually but which in sum amounted to sheer madness.

James did not turn away from his look, odd though it was. Once again he had the chance to note the indescribable peculiarity of this man who had managed enormous sails out in the blind empty black between the unwilling stars. He was young as a boy. The body which gave him his name was strong and golden. His beard must have been removed permanently, because his skin was that of a middle-aged woman: well-kept, pleasant, but showing the unmistakable wrinkles of age and betraying no sign of the normal stubble which males in Hydra’s culture preferred to leave on their faces. The skin had age without experience. 

James had learned to be an acute observer of people as his mentor took up with one fanatic after another; he knew full well that people carry their secret biographies written in the muscles of their faces, and that a stranger passing on the street tells us, (whether they wish it or not) all their inmost intimacies. If one but looks sharply enough one can tell whether fear or help or amusement has tallied the hours of their days; one can catch the dim but persistent reflections of their secret pleasures and the reflections of other people whose lives have touched this one.

All of this was absent from Captain Frail-no-more. He had age, but not the stigmata of age, he had growth without the normal markings of growth; he had grown older without living, in a time and world where most people stayed young while living too much. He was the uttermost opposite of Dr. Zola that James had ever seen, and with a pang of undirected appreciation James realized that this man meant a great deal to his future life, whether he wished it so or not. He saw a young bachelor, prematurely old, a man whose love had been given to emptiness and horror, not the tangible rewards and disappointments of human life. He had had all space for his mistress, and space had used him harshly. Still young, he was old. Already old, he was young.

The mixture was one which he knew he had never seen before, and which he suspected that no one else had ever seen either. Steve had in the beginning of life the sorrow, compassion, and wisdom that most people find only at the end.

It was Steve that broke the silence. “You did say, didn’t you, that you yourself had put in to be a sailor?”

Even to himself, James’ answer sounded silly. “I’m the youngest man ever to qualify with the necessary scientific subjects while still strong enough to pass the physical...”

“You must be unusual,” Steve said mildly. 

James realized, with a thrill, a sweet and bitterly real hope that this young-old man from the stars had never heard of the “perfect son” who had been laughed at in the moments of being born, the boy who had all of Hydra for a mother, who was famous and unusual and alone so terribly much that he could not even imagine being ordinary, happy, decent, or simple. _It would take a wise freak from beyond the stars to overlook who I am,_ he thought, but all he said aloud was, “It’s no use talking about me being ‘unusual.’ I am tired of this earth, and since I don’t have to die to leave it, I think I would like to sail to the stars. I’ve got less to lose than you may think…” He started to talk about Dr. Zola but stopped himself in time.

The compassionate blue eyes were upon him, and at this point it was Steve, not James, who was in control of the situation. James looked at the eyes themselves. They had stayed open for seventy years, in the blackness near to the pitch darkness of the tiny cabin. The dim dials had shone like blazing suns upon his tired retinas before he was able to turn his eyes away. From time to time he had looked out at the black nothing to see the silhouettes of his sails: almost-blackness against total blackness, as the miles of their sweep sucked up the push of light itself and accelerated him and his frozen cargo at almost unmeasurable speeds across and ocean of unfathomable silence. Yet what Steve had done, James had asked to do.

The stare of Steve’s blue eyes had yielded to a smile of his lips. In the young-old face, masculine in structure and feminine in texture, the smile gave an impression of tremendous kindness. James felt singularly much like weeping when he saw the sailor smile in that particular way at him. Was that what people learned between the stars? To care for other people very much indeed and to spring upon them only to reveal love and not devouring to their prey?

In a measured voice, Steve said, “I believe you. You’re the first one that I have believed. All these people have said that they wanted to be sailors too, even when they looked at me. They could not know what it means, but they said it anyhow, and I hated them for saying it. You, though, you’re different. Perhaps you will sail among the stars, but I hope you will not.”

As though waking from a dream, Steve looked around the luxurious room, with the gilt-and-enamel robot waiters standing aside with negligent elegance. They were designed to be always present and never obtrusive: this was a difficult aesthetic effect to achieve, but their designer had achieved it.

The rest of the evening progressed with the inevitability of good music. They went together to the forever-lonely beach which the architects of New Madrid had built beside the hotel. They talked a little, they looked at each other, and they made love with an affirmative tenderness which seemed outside themselves. Steve was very gentle, and he did not realize that in genitally sophisticated society, he was the first lover James had ever wanted or ever had. (How could the protege of Dr. Zola want a lover or a mate or a child?)

The next afternoon, James exercised the freedom of his times and asked Steve to marry him. They had gone back to their private beach, which, through miracles of ultrafine mini weather adjustments, brought a Polynesian afternoon to the high chilly plateau of Central Spain. James asked Steve to marry him, and Steve refused, as kindly as a man of ninety-five can refuse a boy of eighteen. James did not press him; they continued their bittersweet love affair.

They sat on the artificial sand of the artificial beach and dabbled their toes in the man-warmed water of the ocean. Then they lay down against an artificial sand dune that hid New Madrid from view. “Tell me,” James said, “can I ask again, why did you become a sailor?”

“Not so easily answered,” Steve said. “Adventure, maybe. That, at least in part. And I wanted to see Earth. Couldn’t afford to come in a pod. Now, well. I’ve earned enough to keep me the rest of my life. I can go back to New Earth as a passenger in a month instead of seventy years – be frozen in no more time than the wink of an eye, put in my cryo pod, linked into the next ship, and wake up home again while some other fool does the sailing.”

James nodded. He did not bother to tell Steve that he knew all this. “Out where you sail among the stars,” he said, “can you tell me – can you possibly tell me anything of what it’s like out there?”

Steve’s face looked inward on his soul and afterward his voice came as from an immense distance. “There are moments,” he said, “Or weeks – you can’t really tell in the ship – when it seems worthwhile. You feel… your nerve endings reach out until they touch the stars. You feel enormous somehow.” Gradually he came back to the present. “It’s trite to say, of course, but you’re never really the same afterward. I don’t just mean the obvious physical thing, but – you find yourself – or maybe lose yourself. That’s why,” he continued, gesturing toward New Madrid, out of sight behind the sand dune, “I can’t stand this. New Earth, well, there’s something fresh about it. Nobody has to be perfect, or obedient… anybody can try anything, or say anything. And people take care of each other; it’s not all this spying and backstabbing and competition. Here...”

“I know,” said James Hydra, and he did. The corrupt, vicious, slightly decadent air of Earth must have had a stifling effect on the man from beyond the stars.

“There,” Steve said, “you won’t believe this, but there’s no propaganda department overseeing the press. We have art that doesn’t come from machines and pleasures that come from our own minds without anyone conditioning us to them. I have to get back to New Earth.”

James said nothing for a little while, concentrating on stilling the pain in his heart. “I… I…,” he began.

“I know,” Steve said fiercely, turning almost savagely toward James. “But I can’t take you. I can’t! You’re too young, and you’ve got a live to live and I’ve thrown away a quarter of mine. No. That’s not right; I didn’t throw it away. I wouldn’t trade it back because it’s given me something inside I never had before. And it’s given me you.”

“But,” James started again to argue.

“No. Don’t spoil it. I’m going next week to be frozen in my pod to wait for the next ship. I can’t stand much more of this, and I might weaken. That would be a terrible mistake. But we have this time together now, and we have our separate lifetimes to remember in. Don’t think of anything else. There’s nothing, nothing we can do.”

James did not speak, then or ever, of the wild schemes he conceived in that moment, of using Steve’s celebrity somehow to change this old world for the better, of using the strength the doctors of Hydra gave him when he emerged wheezing from the ship to help take the whole system down. He did the only thing he could. At the end of their time in New Madrid, he let Steve say a real goodbye. Wordless and without tears, he left. Then he went back to Culver and confirmed his place as the youngest man to sail a ship to the stars.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The presiding Fuhrer of Hydra at that time was a man called Schmidt. Schmidt was never noted for tenderness of spirit nor for a high regard for the disorderly proclivities of young people. His aide said to him, “This boy wants to sail a ship to New Earth. Are you going to let him?”

“Why not?” said Schmidt. “An asset is an asset. He is well-bred, well-educated. If he fails, we will make an example of him. If he succeeds, it will shut up some of these colonials who have been complaining.” The Fuhrer leaned over his desk. “If he qualifies, if he goes, send some of the STRIKE teams with him. Not convicts. The convicts have had too free a reign in the colonies. We’ve been hearing things about New Earth’s political tendencies. We need to bring them back under the heel of the fatherland. Give him all the fanatics. We have enough; don’t you have some twenty or thirty thousand who are waiting?”

“Yes, sir. Twenty-six thousand, two hundred. Not counting recent additions.”

“Very well,” said the Fuhrer, “Give him the whole lot of them and give him that new ship. Have we named it yet?”

“The _Lemurian Star,_ sir.”

A contemptuous smile crossed the face of the dictator. He said, “Take that ship and fill it with a conquering army. And let James Hydra be a hero if he wants to. He’s not much use to us here, not the way he was born and brought up. And attempts at correcting his personality have not been fruitful. Let him go. Let him have it.”

Schmidt straightened and stared at his aide and then repeated very firmly, “Let him have it, _only if he qualifies.”_

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

James Hydra did qualify.

The doctors and the experts used their most refined indoctrination techniques to prepare him. “You are preforming a great sacrifice for Hydra. Seventy years will pour out of your life in a single month. You leave here a boy. You will get there as a man of ninety. Well, you will probably still have a hundred years to live after that. It will be painful. You will have all these personnel, thousands and thousands of soldiers. You will have some earth cargo. There will be about thirty thousand pods strung on sixteen lines behind you. Then you will have the control cabin to live in. We will give you as many robots as you need; probably a dozen. You will have a mainsail and a foresail and you will have to keep the two of them.”

“I will comply,” James promised. “And I will sail the ship with light, and if the infrared touches that sail – I go. If I get radio interference, I pull the sails in. And if the sails fail, I wait as long as I live.”

The technician looked a little cross. “There is no call for you to get tragic about it. If you want to be tragic, you can be tragic without destroying thirty thousand other warriors or wasting a large amount of Hydra property. You can drown in the water right here or jump into a volcano. Tragedy is not the hard part. The hard part is when you don’t quite succeed and have to keep on fighting. When you must keep going on and on in the face of really hopeless odds, of real temptations to despair.

“Now, we are going to install the feeds for communicating with the servo-robots. You had better use the robots sparingly, because after all, these batteries, even though they are atomic, have to last seventy years. They have got to keep you alive.”

“Yes, sir,” said James, settling into the chair.

“You have got to remember what your job is. You’re going because you are cheap. You are going because a sailor takes a lot less weight than a server farm. There is no all-purpose AI that weighs less than two hundred pounds. You do. You go because you are expendable. Anyone that goes out to the stars takes a one in three chance of never getting there. But you are not going because you are a leader, you are going because you are young. You have a life to give and life to spare. Because your nerves are good. You understand that?

“Yes sir.”

“Furthermore, you are going because you’ll make the trip in seventy years. If we send automatic devices and have them manage the sails, they would get there – possibly. But it would take them from a hundred and twenty years or more, and by that time the cryo pods would have failed, most of the human cargo would not be fit for travel, and the loss of battery power, no matter how we tweak it, would be enough to ruin the entire expedition. So remember that the tragedy and the trouble you face is mostly work. Work and that’s all it is. That is your your big job.”

James smiled. He was a square fellow with rich dark hair, pale eyes, and glowering eyebrows, but when he smiled he was almost a child again, and a rather charming one. He said, “my job is work. I understand that, sir.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The make-ready process was fast but not hurried. The senior medical officer was very blunt. “We are going to make you live seventy years out of your life in one month. Are you ready to comply?”

James nodded, white of face, and the doctor went on. “Now, to give you those seventy years we’ve got to slow down your bodily processes. After all, the sheer biological task of breathing seventy years worth of air in one month involves a factor of over eight hundred to one. Even enhanced lungs couldn’t stand it. Your body must circulate water. It must take in food. You’ll need vitamins.

“Now, what we are going to do is slow the brain down, very much indeed, so that the brain will be working at about that eight-hundred-to-one ratio. We don’t want you incapable of working; you will be managing the sails. Unnecessary processes, such as those associated with social interaction, will be slowed even further. Therefore, if you hesitate or if you start to think, a thought or two is going to take several weeks. 

“Meanwhile, your body can be slowed down some, but the different parts can’t be slowed down at the same rate. Water, for example, we brought down to about eighty to one. Food, to about three hundred to one. You won’t have time to drink seventy years’ worth of water. We circulate it, get it through, purify it, and get it back in your system, unless you break your link-up.

“So what you face is a month of being absolutely wide awake, being operated on constantly and without anesthetic, while doing some of the hardest work mankind has ever found. You’ll have to watch your lines of pods of people and cargo behind you; you’ll have to adjust the sails. If there is anyone surviving at the destination point, they will come out and meet you.

“At least, that’s what happens most of the time. If they don’t meet you, take an orbit beyond the farthest planet and either let yourself die or try to save yourself. You can’t get thirty thousand people down on a planet single-handedly.

“Meanwhile, though, you’ve got a real job. You will shape the history of the planet. And we will reshape you to accomplish this. We’ll start by putting valves in your chest arteries. Then we go on, catheterizing your water. We are going to make an artificial colostomy that will go forward here just in front of your hip joint. Your water intake has a certain psychological value so that one eight-hundredth of your water you will drink out of a straw. The rest will go directly to your bloodstream. About a fiftieth of your food will go that way. You understand?”

“You mean,” James said, “I eat one fiftieth, and the rest goes in through the tubes or intravenously?”

“That’s right,” said the medical technician. “Now, these lines have a double connection. One set runs into the maintenance machine. That will become the logistic support for your body. And these lines are the umbilical cord for a human being alone among the stars. They are your life. If they were to break, or you were to fall, you might faint for a year or two. If that happens, your local system takes over. That’s the pack at your back.

“On earth, it weighs as much as you do. You have already been drilled with the model pack. You know how easy it is to handle in space. That’ll keep you going for a subjective period of about two hours. Nobody has worked out how to match a visible clock with human subjective time, so instead we’re giving you an odometer that reads your pulse and marks it off in tens of thousands of pulse-beats. You may get some information out of it.” 

The technician looked sharply at James, lying strapped to the chair, and turned back to his tools, preparing to lower the halo. “Now, let’s get your brain slowed down.” He smiled grimly, but the grimness turned for a moment to pity as he took in James’ brave, obstinate expression.

“I ain’t fighting,” James said, “This is as bad as a marriage and the stars are my betrothed.” The image of the sailor, Steve, went across his mind, but he said nothing of that.

“No dramatics, please,” the technician sniffed, “You are going to be psychotic enough as it is. You can’t even expect to remain sane. So you’d best not worry about it. You’ll have to be insane to manage the sales and survive utterly alone and be out there even a month. And your vanity, if you have any, is going to take a hit too. We haven’t put any mirrors in, but you’ll probably catch a glimpse of yourself in shiny surfaces here and there.

“You won’t look so good. We’ve killed most of your hair follicles. Otherwise you’d be swamped in your own beard. And a tremendous amount of the nutrient solution would be wasted if it went into raising hair. We’ll just inhibit the hair on top of your head – whether it comes out the same color or not is something you will find for yourself later. And you will be visibly older every time you catch a glimpse of yourself, and you’ll lose bone and muscle mass in the low-G. Did you ever meet the sailor who came in?”

“Yes,” James said, trying to be polite as the technician continued politely hurting him, “Yes, you pumped him full of the Sailor Serum. He got his bones and muscles back and then some and he got the nickname of Captain Frail-no-more.”

“The serum may prevent you looking quite so bad when you come out. You’d best hope so; who knows what kind of facilities they’ll have out on New Earth, and sending in the STRIKE teams to take corrective measures always buggers up the established routines for the short term.”

“I’m ready to comply,” James said again, and the technician brought the halo the rest of the way down.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Two weeks later from James’ point of view was thirty-six years later according to the chronometer on the ship’s bridge. He turned for the gazillionth time to check the sails.

His back ached with a violent throb. He could hear the steady roar of his heart like a vibrator as the device set into his wrist slowly ticked off ten-thousands of beats. He heard the steady whistle of air as his lungs seemed to shudder with sheer speed. And he felt the throbbing pain of a large tube feeding an immense quantity of mushy water directly into the artery of his neck. On his abdomen, he felt as if someone had built a fire. The evacuation tube operated automatically but it burnt as if a coal had been held to his skin, and a catheter, which connected his bladder to another tube, stung as a savagely as the prod of a scalding-hot needle. His head ached and his vision blurred.

But he could still see the instruments and he could still watch the sails. Now and then he could glimpse, faint as a tracery of dust, the immense skein of people and cargo that lay behind him.

He could not sit down; that hurt too much. The only way he could be comfortable for resting was to lean against the instrument console, ribs against the instrument panel, forehead against the meters.

Once he rested that way and realized it was two and a half months before he got up. He knew that rest had no meaning. He could see his face moving, a distorted image of his own face growing older in the reflections from the glass face of a dial. He could look at his arms with blurring vision, note the skin tightening, loosening, and tightening again, as changes in temperature affected it.

He was able, despite the best efforts of the technicians, to think a little. Out in the hugeness of space, his body attuned to a ship that was nearly forty thousand miles across, James could not be frightened any longer that a red-faced old man who already had a planet under his thumb might not be able to command those strange, kindly, eugenically imperfect inhabitants of New Earth, under another star. The weary insistence that James must not be tragic at other peoples’ expense twisted itself, out there, until James thought how tragic it would be, if to flee a life he did not want on a planet full of people that hurt him, he agreed to spread the plague elsewhere. Was it not tragic, that out of love for a man with blue eyes and unshakable kindness, James was ready to transport an army that would destroy his lover’s home and remake it as a copy of the place James wanted to flee? Was that not a tragedy and a vast waste to be avoided?

Better, James thought, that he be one of the two ships out of three that never made it. That he and all thirty-six thousand fanatics drift in the blackness between the stars until the atomic batteries failed, until the careful balance of unstable elements that kept the flesh of the cryo-frozen army intact degraded to nothing and the soldiers burst, cell by cell, as super-chilled water expanded into ice.

James thought about that for nearly six months, according to the chronometers. Then, he began the sequence to furl the sails. He selected the right control and opened it for a week or so. He waited there, his heart buzzing, his throat whistling air, his fingernails breaking off gently as they grew. Finally he checked to see if it really had been the right one, pushed again, and nothing happened.

He pushed a third time. There was no response.

Now he went to the master panel, re-read, checked the light direction. His reading had been correct, but the sails were not obeying. Something was wrong.

He went back to the emergency panel and pressed. Nothing happened. 

He broke out a repair robot and sent it out to work a manual override on the sail generators. The robot went out and in an instant (three days) later, it replied “does not conform.”

He sent out a second repair robot. That had no effect either.

He sent a third, the last. Three bright lights. “Does not conform.” The sails would not furl.

He stood there, wearied and lost in space, and he prayed. “Not for me, God. I am running away from a life I did not want. But for Steve and the poor souls on New Earth who are brave enough to live in chaos and freedom in the light of another star, I ask you, help me now.” He thought he had prayed very fervently and hoped he would get an answer.

It did not work out that way. He was bewildered, alone.

There was no sun. There was nothing, except the tiny bridge of the great ship, and himself alone. He sensed the thrill and ripple of his muscles as they went through days of adjustment while his mind noticed only minutes. He leaned forward, forced himself to relax.. He called up the emergency controls again.

As he reached for the controls for the bots, he felt a hand on his shoulder, and there, beside him, was the sailor, the sailor from the stars, Captain Frail-no-more. Steve. He said, “It won’t work that way.”

He stood, clear and handsome, the way James had seen him in New Madrid. He had no tubes, he did not tremble, James could see the normal rise and fall of his chest as he took one breath every hour or so. One part of his mind knew that Steve was a hallucination. Another part of him believed that Steve was real. James was insane, and he was very happy to be insane at this time, so he let the hallucination give him advice.

“There are fail-safes built in against your madness,” Steve told him gently, “since they knew you would go mad. If the navigational system doesn’t register port coordinates nearby, there’s a limit to how much it’ll let you pull the sails in.”

“I’ll have to find some other way to slag the ship, then,” James sighed. “We can’t let these soldiers try and take over New Earth like they’ve done with the Old.”

“Can you cut their pods without slagging the whole ship? Because the cargo is cargo we could use, on New Earth. Because I would like to see you in Newer York, as you saw me in New Madrid.”

That was when James remembered that one of the busybodies who stocked the bridge had included a weapon. What they thought he would use a weapon for, he did not know. It had a range of two hundred thousand miles. The target could be refined, especially if one had taken up marksmanship in ones’ youth to avoid having to beat up one’s classmates.

Smiling like sunlight, Steve talked him through the process of pulling up the ship’s manifest and identifying the personnel pods among the long streams of cargo, of aiming the weapon through the wall of the bridge, setting it at a low charge that would disturb the cryo machinery but not sever the tow lines, except in a few cases where the line was all soldiers and no other cargo. 

The Lemurian Star rolled and thrummed as its load shifted in mass. The servo-robots attacked like maddened ants. James pulled and mashed buttons as fast as he could, managing two or three keystrokes an hour in his excitement, trimming the sails and using the diminished mass of the ship to set a faster course to New Earth.

With a sense of bewilderment close to religion, James perceived the wind of starlight blowing against the immense sails. They unfurled to their full extent and snapped into position. He got a momentary touch of gravity as the _Lemurian Star_ accelerated. He was back on course.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“It’s a mess, this new ship,” Portmaster Fury told his staff. “It looked at first like another attack from those Reich motherfuckers from Old Earth. But every single one of the personnel pods had been destroyed. The sailor says he did it, poor crazy bastard, he must have been just a kid when they shoved him into the cockpit; nineteen, maybe? Says his name is James.”

Captain Frail-no-more dropped his laser stylus. He did not believe it. But he went to the medical wing and there he saw James Hydra.

“Here I am, sailor,” said he, “I sailed too.” His face was white as chalk; his expression was that of a youth of about twenty. His body was that of a well-preserved man of sixty.

As for Steve, he had not changed again, since he had returned home a century and a half from the time he left it, frozen inside a pod. He looked at James. His eyes narrowed. “Bucky,” he whispered.

“Who the hell is Bucky?”

In a sudden reversal of roles, it was Steve that knelt beside the bed, covering James’ hands with his tears. Half-coherently, he babbled. “I ran away from you because I loved you so. I came back here where you would never follow, or if you did follow, you’d still be a boy, and I’d still be to old. But I couldn’t forget that huge smile of yours that made all your teeth stand out… I gave you a nickname, in my head, I talked to you at night, sometimes, when I wondered where my old world had gone… but you have sailed the _Lemurian Star_ in here, and you wanted me.”

Doctor Shuri did not know the rules that should be applied to the sailors from the stars. Very quietly she went out of the room, smiling in tenderness and human pity a the love which she had seen. But she was a practical woman and she had a sense of her own advancement. She called a friend of hers at the news service and said, “I think I have got the biggest romance this century. If you get here soon enough you can get the first telling of the story of James Hydra and Captain Frail-no-more. They just met like that. I guess they’d seen each other somewhere. They just met like that and fell in love.”

Doctor Shuri did not know they had forsworn a love on earth. She did not know that James Hydra had made a lonely trip with an icy purpose, and she did not know that the crazy image of Captain Frail-no-more, the sailor himself, had stood beside James thirty-six years out from nothing-at-all in the depth and blackness of space between the stars.

Outsiders never knew the real end of the story.

More than a century after their wedding, James lay dying; he was dying happily because his beloved sailor was beside him. He believed that if they could conquer space, they might conquer death as well.

His loving, happy, weary dying mind blurred over and he picked up an argument they hadn’t touched upon for decades. “You were _so_ on the bridge,” he said. “You did stand beside me aboard the _Lemurian Star_ when I was lost and did not know how to stop from bringing an army to New Earth.”

Steve squeezed his hand. “If I came then, darling, I’ll come again, wherever you are. You’re my heart, my own true love. Your my bravest of boys, my boldest friend. You’re my own. Yo sailed for me. You’re my soldier who sailed the _Star._ ” Steve’s voice broke, but his features stayed calm. He had never before seen anyone die so confident and so happy.

**Author's Note:**

> I can't take a whole lot of credit for this one, folks. Cordwainer Smith wrote most, if not all, of the good bits. If you like this and you haven't yet found the rich and strange world of the Instrumentality series, I promise you it is well worth your time.


End file.
